Let’s stop pretending: this isn’t about reverence for the dead. This is about power—naked, unvarnished, undignified power—and a society so intoxicated by bureaucracy, so in love with its own dysfunction, that it is willing to desecrate its collective soul just to win another skirmish in the political mud pit.

Mourners, some clutching their hearts in grief, some still hoping for closure, were left standing. Not standing in respect, but in shame—as the courts spat in the face of tradition, as politicians bickered over the corpse of a nation’s past leader. And before you reach for that feeble defense—'But we are a nation of laws!'—ask yourself: when did laws become the chains we use to handcuff the very rituals that make us human?

Nobody wants to say it, but here’s the ugly truth: the former Zambian president’s funeral was never about honoring a life. It became a twisted proxy war, a grotesque puppet show in which the strings of litigation, ego, and historical bitterness yanked even the dead from peace. Our so-called respect for the departed? It is conditional. Conditional on political expediency, on legal technicalities, on the manufactured outrage of whichever side gets the most camera time. This is not mourning; it’s hostage-taking.

Feel disgusted. You should. Because you—the citizen, the bystander—are not innocent. Every time you sigh and say, 'That’s just the way things are,' you become a foot soldier in the army of apathy. You tolerate a society where the living cannot even offer the dead a final moment of dignity because everyone is too busy plotting their next move, too busy scanning for power shifts, too numbed by precedent to see the horror of this breakdown. Deep down, you know this: When we interrupt the rites of our dead, we are declaring that no one—living or deceased—is safe from the machinery of greed and retribution that defines our politics.

Are you angry yet? Good. Now do something about it. Demand better. Demand that the dead, at least, be delivered from the petty squabbles of the living. Face it: until we do, every funeral is a mirror, reflecting back the smirking faces of our own hypocrisy.

This article was inspired by the headline: 'Mourners left waiting as court orders halt to former Zambian president’s funeral'.